Semi-Detached, by Griff Rhys Jones
17th Nov 2006, 01:55 GMT
Memoir is an odd genre, and increasingly popular, yet we don't seem entirely sure what it's for. Excluding the "celebrity" memoir (and though there have been moments of celebrity in Griff Rhys Jones's life, he is not a celebrity), there are books that take the form of memoir while achieving something altogether more profound. Recent years have seen a flowering of this form. Blake Morrison's And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Andrew Collins's Where Did It All Go Right?, and Jeremy Harding's Mother Country all address far wider questions of origin and childhood. Darker and more complex memoirs, such as Lorna Sage's Bad Blood and Elizabeth Speller's The Sunlight on the Garden, set honest and often disturbing self-revelation against broader issues of politics, war and deracination.
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